Trip types · 7 min read
Road trip budget: how to plan fuel, tolls and stops
A road trip feels cheap because there's no plane ticket, so people forget to budget it at all. Then the fuel receipts, the toll booths and three nights of motels add up to more than a flight would have cost. The good news: a road trip is one of the easiest trips to estimate accurately, because most of the big costs come down to numbers you can look up before you leave.
Start with the fuel, because it's the number you can actually calculate
Fuel is usually the single biggest line, and it's the one people guess at instead of working out. You need three things: total distance, how much your car drinks, and the price per litre.
The formula is simple. Take your distance in kilometres, divide by 100, multiply by your car's consumption in litres per 100 km, then multiply by the fuel price. A car doing 7 litres per 100 km on a 1,600 km trip burns 112 litres. At around €1.80 per litre that's roughly €200 of fuel one way, so budget €400 for the round trip.
If you think in miles per gallon, convert once and be done with it. A rough rule: 40 mpg is about 7 litres per 100 km, 30 mpg is about 9.4. Whatever your car does on the motorway, use the real-world figure, not the optimistic one on the brochure. Loaded with luggage and running the air conditioning, most cars use more than their official number.
- Small petrol hatchback: around 6 litres per 100 km on the motorway.
- Family estate or mid-size SUV: 7 to 9 litres per 100 km.
- Large diesel van or seven-seater: 9 to 11 litres per 100 km.
- Electric: think in kWh instead. Roughly 18 to 22 kWh per 100 km, and public rapid chargers can cost as much as fuel once you're on the road.
Add tolls and vignettes before you cross a border
This is the part that catches people out, because it's invisible until you hit it. Toll systems vary wildly across Europe, and the rules are worth checking per country you'll drive through.
- Per-kilometre tolls (France, Italy, Spain, Portugal): you pay at booths or by camera. A long run across France can easily be €60 to €90 in tolls one way.
- Vignettes (Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Czechia, Hungary): you buy a sticker or a digital pass for a set period. A Swiss vignette is one price for the whole year, an Austrian one you can buy for 10 days.
- City charges: low-emission zones and congestion charges in places like London, Milan and many German cities. Some need a registration or a windscreen sticker bought in advance.
Add these up per country before you go. For a two-week loop through several countries, tolls and vignettes together can realistically land anywhere from €80 to €250. Treat that as a rough guide, not a quote, and check the current rates for your exact route.
Tip
Log fuel and tolls as you drive
PocketTrip lets you capture each fill-up and toll on the spot and tracks it against your road trip budget, so you always know how much of the tank money is left.
Your own car or a hire car?
If you already own the car, the marginal cost of driving it is mostly fuel, tolls and wear. Don't ignore the wear entirely though. A long trip adds servicing, tyres and the odd repair down the line, and many people quietly budget around 8 to 12 cents per kilometre to cover that. On a 3,000 km trip that's €240 to €360 you won't see on any receipt.
Hiring makes sense when your own car isn't suited to the trip, when you'd rack up huge mileage on a car you want to keep, or when you're flying to the start point. Watch the extras that never show in the headline price:
- Young-driver or additional-driver fees, often €10 to €15 per day each.
- The insurance excess. The cheap rate usually leaves you liable for €800 to €1,500 if anything happens.
- Cross-border fees if you're taking the car into another country.
- Fuel policy. "Full to full" is fair. "Full to empty" almost always overcharges you.
A €35 per day quote can quietly become €60 once the excess cover and a second driver are added, so compare the real total, not the sticker.
Overnight stays: the cost that scales with your route
Where you sleep is where a road trip budget lives or dies, because it multiplies by every night. A roadside motel might be €55, a mid-range hotel in a nice town €110, a campsite pitch €25 to €40. Mixing them is the trick. A few cheap nights on driving days buy you one good hotel where you actually want to linger.
Book the first and last nights in advance so arrival and departure are stress-free, then stay flexible in the middle if you like changing plans on the road. Just remember that "we'll find something" in high season can mean paying whatever the last room in town costs.
Food and the small stuff
Road trip food splits into two habits. There's the fun part, a proper lunch in a town you drove out of your way to see. And there's the fuel-station part, the coffees and snacks that vanish from memory but not from your card. Budget both. A realistic day might be €8 on coffee and snacks, €12 on a quick lunch and €25 on a sit-down dinner, so around €45 per person per day for food alone. Pack a cooler for driving days and you'll knock a chunk off that.
Turn it into a per-day number
Once you have the pieces, do what works for any trip: separate the fixed costs from the daily ones. Fuel, tolls, vignettes and car hire are largely fixed, you can total them up front. Accommodation, food and activities are your daily spend. Add everything, add a buffer of 10 to 15% for the surprise repair or the pricier-than-expected campsite, then divide the daily portion by the number of days to get a target you can steer by. Our travel budget calculator walks through exactly this split if you want a starting structure.
Splitting the cost with passengers
Four people in one car is what makes a road trip cheap, but only if the money is handled fairly. The usual snag is that one person pays for fuel, another grabs the tolls, someone else covers the first hotel, and by day four nobody remembers who's owed what.
The clean approach: everyone logs what they pay into one shared trip, then you settle up once at the end. Fuel and tolls are genuinely shared, so they split evenly across everyone in the car. A private museum ticket one person bought only counts for them. If you want the mechanics of doing this without it getting awkward, we wrote a whole piece on tracking group trip expenses, and the split cost calculator handles the "who owes whom" maths so you don't do it in your head at a service station.
Let the app keep the tally
You can run all of this on paper, but a moving car is exactly where paper falls apart. PocketTrip is built for the drive: set your road trip budget, log each fill-up and toll the moment you pay (or scan the receipt and let on-device AI read the amount), split shared costs across everyone in the car, and see your remaining budget update live. Everything stays private on your device, synced through your own iCloud on iPhone and iPad and backed up to your own Google account on Android. The free tier covers one trip and 25 expenses, which is enough to try it on a long weekend. PocketTrip Pro is €4,99 a month, €19,99 a year or €49,99 once for lifetime if you road-trip often.
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Keep reading: How to track group trip expenses without the awkwardness →